not your mama's music appreciation

04/08/15 Walk-up Music: Personal Soundtracks and Musical Signatures

A musical story for baseball season: most Ballparks used live organists beginning in the 1940s, but in recent years, recorded music has largely replaced them. The trend is reversing a little bit, though! Here’s the story of one modern ballpark organist, Matthew Kaminski, who plays at Turner Field for the Atlanta Braves:

“Wagner revolutionized opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), by which he sought to synthesize the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama.”(Wikipedia)

Rigoletto, 1851
Story of a womanizing Duke (a character somewhat similar to Don Giovanni) and his court jester, set in Renaissance Italy
Based on a play, Le roi s’amuse (“The King Has Fun”), written in 1832 by Victor Hugo, author of Les Misèrables
Themes: vengeance, doomed love, mistaken identity

– A court jester provided entertainment for monarchs and other nobility, and could also get away with criticizing, poking fun at them, or delivering bad news, because they did it in a joking way.

Updating opera for modern audiences: a new version at New York’s Metropolitan Opera sets the story in Las Vegas in the early 1960s, with the duke as a popular singer and the jester as a stand-up comic